roisa meets animal crossing pt. 5
Time traveling quickly became Rose’s new best friend. Not because she didn’t like her villagers. Ish. They were okay. But after some quick scrolling around online, she’d learned about so many other villagers that she didn’t have and definitely wanted. The first thing on her to-do list was to get rid of Biff. Actually, Biff wasn’t so bad. She didn’t like him, but she didn’t loathe him entirely the way she did the gorilla whose name she hadn’t even learned who she had to invite to live there because he was her first camper.
Stupid shitty gaming decision, making her invite the camper. She didn’t care if that was just the game teaching her that she could invite campers or not. She shouldn’t have to invite anyone she didn’t want to invite. It was her island, after all.
And since it was her island, she could kick them off, and if she had to time travel to do it, well then, good riddance.
Biff had been the first one to go. She understood that. He was probably getting tired of her thwacking him with her net whenever she saw him. She’d tried to hit him with the ax, but she figured Luisa wouldn’t have approved of that. Not that it mattered in a video game, but maybe she shouldn’t be too violent in what was supposed to be a chill video game.
She hit the gorilla with the axe. It didn’t do anything. She regretted that. She had a shovel. She could bury him. Or throw him in the ocean. But then his house and all of his stuff would be there—
She could take some of his stuff. And if he was gone long enough, maybe someone else would move into his house.
That isn’t the way the game works, Rose.
She could hear Luisa’s voice in her head. That was maybe the best part of the game, hearing Luisa tell her that she should love and appreciate all of the animals (she didn’t; she definitely didn’t) and giving her tips and suggestions on how to change her island to make it even better looking (half of the time she ignored this because as much as she was building the island to entertain Luisa, she’d quickly learned that she wanted to build her island to appeal to her own sensibilities. Luisa would not like the roses everywhere, but Rose? Rose did).
Blanche was the first of the villagers that Rose actively hunted for. She didn’t love all of the ostriches – she didn’t want all of the ostriches – but one look at her, and she loved her. As much as she could love a video game character. Which was significantly less than she could love actual real life people who weren’t Luisa. So, really, she didn’t love her at all. She was just increasingly fond of her.
She quickly replaced all of her male villagers with female ones. Then, on a second thought, because she figured Luisa would like it better if she had one of every kind of villager, she spent hundreds of thousands of Nook Miles Tickets to get Julian, the only smug villager she could stand. Also, he was a unicorn. And unicorns were fine, in her book. She briefly considered collecting the mythical set – Julian, the unicorn; Drago, the dragon; and Phoebe, the phoenix – but decided against that when she saw Drago.
Ugh. No.
She did get Phoebe, though. There was something symbolic about having a phoenix on her island. And she liked the ostrich design anyway. And she looked so nice with Blanche.
Fuchsia got to stay. She liked Fuchsia. She hadn’t gotten attached to a stupid video game character, but she was one of the few villagers she’d been randomly given that she actually liked – and there weren’t a lot of them she liked at all to begin with, so why would she get rid of her? She didn’t feel bad when Fuchsia tried to leave during the time traveling. She just didn’t let her go.
There was something invigorating about that – about having a villager bring up that they wanted to leave, about having a villager ask for her permission to leave, and then getting to tell them no, they had to stay with her even longer, even if they really, really didn’t want to. It always made her grin with glee.
Not that she could explain that to Luisa, who she was sure let her villagers leave whenever they asked, no matter how much it broke her heart, because she would want them to be able to explore new horizons. Not that she would know that, though, since she still hadn’t visited Luisa’s island yet.
And that was the strange thing about this – that as much as she wanted to visit Luisa’s island, in truth, a part of her didn’t. She knew that as soon as she visited Luisa’s island she would think that her island should change to match what the love of her life wanted, since she was playing this game for her to begin with – or, at least, she’d started to play it for her and then not so quickly but eventually realized that she liked playing it on her own without any of Luisa’s input.
She missed the Caymans, and while this was not them, while this gave her a level of control she had never had there, it actually was nice to have her own island again. Not that she was going to admit that to Luisa anytime soon.
The problem was that Rose never quite felt like she was done with her island.
Rose would move things and shift things and add things and shuffle her villagers around and then, just as soon as she was finished, a few days later she would start again, moving and adding and shifting and shuffling. No matter what she did, she didn’t feel content with it. Maybe she just wanted to delay the inevitable.
Eventually, Rose realized that she was still trying to make her island to appeal to Luisa, instead of based on her own sensibilities, and that her restlessness was because she kept switching between designing the island she wanted and designing one that she knew Luisa would love. And she kept avoiding letting Luisa see it because she just knew it wouldn’t live up to what Luisa wanted, and it was easier to wait than it was to show it to her.
Rose wasn’t afraid by any means. She couldn’t be afraid, not really.
She just—
No.
You know what?
It was her island, and if she wanted to trash the whole thing, she would.
No matter what Luisa wanted.